You'll Get Lost In The Haunted World Of 'Annihilation'
Area X is magic in the same way Lovecraft's Rhode Island was magic — which is to say, inhabited by impossible things beyond human description. At the same time, it is haunted (which is an entirely different thing) by the previous expeditions and the things they left behind — the tents and supplies, the curiously incomplete maps, the bullet holes, the bloodstains. And VanderMeer is brave in the telling of his story — of the Biologist's story — because he attempts to explain in full almost none of it.
He leaves us only with the Biologist's incomplete discoveries, her assumptions, her fears. He disposes of the hows and wheres and whys of Area X in a sentence (it is near a military base where something went terribly wrong, and it is, somehow, growing). The Southern Reach — the organization sending the expeditions into Area X (and who give name to the planned trilogy, of which Annihilation is just book one) — is only ever mentioned in passing. They are, in a very real way, the THEY of every conversation. They said it had to happen this way, they told us what to expect ...
And yet, the ending is satisfying. It is one of those rare endings which is, all at the same time, ambiguous, terrifically unfinished, and the only possible ending that the story could've had. We began with the Biologist as an unknown and nameless cipher in a world gone around the bend from our own. And we end with the Biologist as, perhaps, the only known thing in that world, going off to experience the rest of it without us.
Jason Sheehan is an ex-chef and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. A Private Little War is his newest book.
Read an excerpt of Annihilation